Looking for a garden designer in Sevenoaks?
Here’s a recent Sevenoaks project – a Desert Modernist garden built around bold colour, clean lines and strong architectural planting.
A Desert Modernist garden
Award-worthy garden design in Sevenoaks, Kent. Scroll down to see how I transformed an overgrown, undulating plot into a Desert Modernism garden.
(The finished garden with orange and blue walls acting as canvases for the ever-changing artistry of the plants in front of them.)This garden in Sevenoaks belonged to a recently refurbished modern home, and the owners wanted the garden to carry the same contemporary feeling outside. During our early conversations one particular style kept coming up as inspiration: Desert Modernism. Clean lines, bold blocks of colour, gravel, boulders and architectural planting. That became the backbone of the whole design.
The starting point was not easy. The plot was overgrown, and the ground was noticeably undulating, which made setting levels one of the more difficult parts of the build.
The design
The two coloured walls do a lot of the work. I coloured them to pick up the tones in the Moroccan encaustic cement tiles used inside the house’s kitchen, so the garden and the interior speak to each other the moment you look out through the bi-fold doors. In front of the walls, the planting has a second life after dark – when it’s backlit at night, the shadows thrown onto the coloured render turn the walls into a living, moving piece of art, a canvas that changes through the seasons.
The rear patio is raised, and that was a deliberate move rather than a cosmetic one. Because it floats above the rest of the garden, anyone sitting there in the evening catches the setting sun over the top of the two walls in front of it. At ground level the sun would drop behind those walls and you’d lose it – lifting the patio hands the evening light back to you. It’s finished in large 600mm x 600mm cream porcelain.
For the paths, I ran 800mm x 800mm Brera porcelain through the garden, surrounded by locally quarried Kentish ragstone aggregate – keeping the materials rooted in Kent while the squared-off tiles echo the crisp geometry of the whole scheme. A water feature and boulders were added to reinforce that same squareness and the desert feel. All the beds and edging are Corten steel, which weathers to a warm rust that sits beautifully against the gravel and grasses.
A rear raised bed clad in light blue tiles lifts the space through the winter months, when the planting has died back, and again nods to that Desert Modernism palette. The boundary itself became part of the design: hit-and-miss green fencing alongside solid clipped Yew rectangles, so the edge of the garden plays man-made against natural.
The client also had a wildlife pond that had to stay – the old liner had been torn by foxes – so it was rebuilt within the new layout with a hard liner to survive them.
The Moroccan encaustic tiles that inspired the colour scheme were carried through to the kitchen area, tying the whole space back to its starting point.
The details
This was a full design-and-build project in Sevenoaks with a budget of around £55,000–£60,000. The site’s undulating ground made levelling one of the trickier challenges, but it’s also what makes the finished garden work on every level – literally.
Thinking about a garden like this in Sevenoaks?
If you’re in Sevenoaks or the surrounding area and you’re planning a new garden, I’d love to hear what you’ve got in mind. Whether it’s a full design-and-build like this one or something smaller, I take on the whole process personally.
Get in touch here or call 07522491794
[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][/et_pb_section]Garden Design in Sevenoaks
Looking for a garden designer in Sevenoaks?
Here’s a recent Sevenoaks project – a Desert Modernist garden built around bold colour, clean lines and strong architectural planting.
A Desert Modernist garden
Award-worthy garden design in Sevenoaks, Kent. Scroll down to see how I transformed an overgrown, undulating plot into a Desert Modernism garden.
(The finished garden with orange and blue walls acting as canvases for the ever-changing artistry of the plants in front of them.)This garden in Sevenoaks belonged to a recently refurbished modern home, and the owners wanted the garden to carry the same contemporary feeling outside. During our early conversations one particular style kept coming up as inspiration: Desert Modernism. Clean lines, bold blocks of colour, gravel, boulders and architectural planting. That became the backbone of the whole design.
The starting point was not easy. The plot was overgrown, and the ground was noticeably undulating, which made setting levels one of the more difficult parts of the build.
The design
The two coloured walls do a lot of the work. I coloured them to pick up the tones in the Moroccan encaustic cement tiles used inside the house’s kitchen, so the garden and the interior speak to each other the moment you look out through the bi-fold doors. In front of the walls, the planting has a second life after dark – when it’s backlit at night, the shadows thrown onto the coloured render turn the walls into a living, moving piece of art, a canvas that changes through the seasons.
The rear patio is raised, and that was a deliberate move rather than a cosmetic one. Because it floats above the rest of the garden, anyone sitting there in the evening catches the setting sun over the top of the two walls in front of it. At ground level the sun would drop behind those walls and you’d lose it – lifting the patio hands the evening light back to you. It’s finished in large 600mm x 600mm cream porcelain.
For the paths, I ran 800mm x 800mm Brera porcelain through the garden, surrounded by locally quarried Kentish ragstone aggregate – keeping the materials rooted in Kent while the squared-off tiles echo the crisp geometry of the whole scheme. A water feature and boulders were added to reinforce that same squareness and the desert feel. All the beds and edging are Corten steel, which weathers to a warm rust that sits beautifully against the gravel and grasses.
A rear raised bed clad in light blue tiles lifts the space through the winter months, when the planting has died back, and again nods to that Desert Modernism palette. The boundary itself became part of the design: hit-and-miss green fencing alongside solid clipped Yew rectangles, so the edge of the garden plays man-made against natural.
The client also had a wildlife pond that had to stay – the old liner had been torn by foxes – so it was rebuilt within the new layout with a hard liner to survive them.
The Moroccan encaustic tiles that inspired the colour scheme were carried through to the kitchen area, tying the whole space back to its starting point.
The details
This was a full design-and-build project in Sevenoaks with a budget of around £55,000–£60,000. The site’s undulating ground made levelling one of the trickier challenges, but it’s also what makes the finished garden work on every level – literally.
Thinking about a garden like this in Sevenoaks?
If you’re in Sevenoaks or the surrounding area and you’re planning a new garden, I’d love to hear what you’ve got in mind. Whether it’s a full design-and-build like this one or something smaller, I take on the whole process personally.
Get in touch here or call 07522491794